


The Unwanteds: Island Of Discovery

by God1643



Category: The Unwanteds Series - Lisa McMann
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 15:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/God1643/pseuds/God1643
Summary: It's a sequel, that I will work on slowly. What more do you want? Requests will help, by the way, as I have very little in plans for this. Ask me what you want and I'll see if it can be worked in. Bye.





	The Unwanteds: Island Of Discovery

He felt more like his mentor with every day that passed, his hair greying, his eyes failing slowly, his voice growing hoarse under the strain of breathing the humid, seaside air.

She left a decade ago, wheeling the little boat out of the lagoon with a smile and a wave, hardening her heart against the way his eyes moistened and burned and watching fondly as he fought the sob fighting to rip free from his chest.

He made stone wings for himself a few days later, sitting, in their rudimentary living, harnessed to a leather mounting for his threadbare rainbow robe.

And even now, almost ten years after she left, he hadn’t yet put them on, knowing, with each idle flap they offered, that he wouldn’t find her if he put them on, and that perhaps she didn’t want to return.

It stung, quite a bit, lashing at his eyes and rending open his chest, as he thought of the way her copper skin glinted in the afternoon sunlight and her eyes laughed, aglow, atop of him as they worked their way, giggling, to a niece for his brother and his twin siblings.

He smiled in the present, seated atop the roof of the mansion, having clambered up with spry motions not normally attributed to one past his sixties.

Alex scratched at his beard, running his paint-stained, clay-clad, calloused fingers over the slight pudginess in his cheeks, feeling the blood vessels swell under the attention, the little veins overworked to pump away the alcohol he now drank like water, giving him that standard redness about the face that all alcoholics had.

He didn’t like it, how her leaving had affected him, how he couldn’t stand to look in the mirror or at his own twin sons, couldn’t take the judging gazes from his sisters and worst of all, the _ knowing _ look Aaron offered him, the slightly older brother understanding how much love hurt when it ended.

It was hard now, watching as Florence and Talon stomped along through the jungle, hand in hand, two drop bears skittering along over their shoulders and hiding in her quiver. Samheed and Lani were gone too, buried beside each other having died fighting Pirate Island soldiers in a misguided and futile attempt at revenge.

Alex felt a bit like ‘The Old Guard’ as basically the last one left, Aaron only puttering around in an advisory capacity for the New Lady of Quill, sending exasperated letters as he continued cracking down hard on some of the younger woman’s impulses, the Twin Brothers sharing exasperation in how wrong their sisters had gone.

“Spoiled ‘em rotten.” He murmured, almost starting at how unexpected the human sound was after so long in silence. He grunted as he stood, feeling his knees creak, and scrambled down an exterior pipe to swing into the window of his office. Nodding as he noticed nothing out of place, he shuffled down to his workspace and murmured the password, now a sequence of Samheed and Lani-derived taps rather than the simplistic ‘Door Number One’.

Say what you will about Marcus Today, security never really was his forte, nor his biggest concern.

“Still moping about?” Came the voice he heard most often now, his personal blackboard, or black-plaque as he called his improved version, the anthropomorphic copy of Megan’s figure rising into three-dimensions from the floor. Her hand, a black shadowy mass not dissimilar to the early blackboards but not lacking physical weight and space, rested on her cocked hip in a pose that implied she was displeased with him.

He grunted an unintelligible response, which she somehow deciphered, as he made his back-bent way over to his desk to sit in Mister Today’s hard wooden chair.

‘A Mage should never sit easy, well, at least not while he’s working.” That second half of the quote was represented by the massive cushion someone could tentatively call chair-shaped at the other end of the workshop, near the towering bookshelf.

“Have you decided whether or not you’re going to bother with leaving, or are you going to leave us sitting dead in the water still?” Megan’s voice needled harder than normal, clearly feeling snide with the approaching decade anniversary. Alex froze, shaking in his hands, growling.

“Yeah.” He whispered, standing, the first clear words he had spoken to another, even if she was not technically alive, in over a month. He grunted as he strode to the opposing workbench, giving a cursory check to the stone plumage, grunting again in satisfaction, and mounted them to his beaten robe.

They flapped eagerly, the simplistic intelligence within finally recognizing a user who wanted them to be used and delighting in the change. They spread and stretched as they linked with his mind, clutching tight to his spine with probing stone fingers in his flesh, both there and not truly there all at once, following the instructions that lanced down his spinal cord and down the stone bones.

Alex smiled like he hadn’t in years, that original devious grin that had made Samheed cower the rare times it came and made Sky ready for ‘action’ like nothing else.

He threw open the door, ignoring the nervous calls of Megan behind him, and slammed it shut behind him, absently casting a massively thick glass wall to lock off his office and striding down the fourth hallway.

Whistling a tune he knew to be both happy to him and eerie to everyone else, he loaded his expanded robe pockets with food from the kitchens, stepped out onto the lawn and flapped hard, taking off with a whoop into the air in one downward push.

“Simber!” He called out with a smile, swooping over the stone statue as he lay purring in sleep, startling the big beast awake with a laugh. “Wake up you dry old prune! We’re going on an adventure!” The cat took off, grumbling the whole way about impetuous bastards and how they never seemed to mellow in old age, beginning to lazily circle his friend and second master.

“Wherrre?” Simber rumbled, so obviously displeased with the disruption to his nap that it almost hurt to have him go anywhere, but Alex powered through with an assurance to himself that his old friend was happy with the change, if secretly.

“Why, Everywhere and nowhere! I have no idea and every idea! It will not be pawful! It will be purrfect, and it shall be an absolutely roaring good time! Let us go, noble friend!” Alex called, swooping around the grumbling cat with powerful flaps, literally running rings about him.

“Oh, heavens, he’s back to the cat puns.” Simber rumbled softly, the equivalent of speaking tongue in cheek for the massive stone feline.

“Of course I am old friend! I haven’t made one in a decade and I must make up for lost time be-fur I run out!” Alex roared out a laugh as he swooped into hover over the cat’s head, the long stone plumage of his wings rattling in the wind.

“Now come on, where’s your sense of spirit? Aren’t you feline confursed? Don’t be lion to me!” Alex shouted over the wind, cackling madly on the combined high of his first flight and sleep deprivation, loving the way SImber growled in protest of the jokes.

“Where arrre we going, you mad bastarrrd?!” Roared Simber, clearly at the end of his fuse.

“Why, to find the love of my life, my old friend! To love and exploration! Follow me!” And with that, the mad cackling mage wheeled about in a whirl of blindingly bright rainbow robe, setting off toward the sunset.


End file.
